Cadillac's Creepy Idea For The XT5 Will Likely Happen

The luxury marque sees the compact crossover replacing the old XTS sedan for a certain task.

The XTS wasn't one of the most successful models that Cadillac has made in recent years, and it wasn't one of the most exciting, either. Even at its peak, the American luxury marque sold barely more than 30,000 of them in a year in the United States. But it was a crucial model for one of its core markets – namely, the livery business, which includes conversion into hearses.

So with the full-size sedan now being discontinued, what does Cadillac intend to market as its replacement? According to the latest, the XT5 crossover.

"An XTS could be turned into a hearse – that can be done with an XT5. It’s physically possible, we had people do it, so there’s opportunity for that," Cadillac's product-marketing director Jason Sledziewski told Motor1. "I think as we exit XTS, and position CT6 differently, it doesn’t mean our portfolio can’t accommodate those sorts of vehicles. They just might be other vehicles than people otherwise thought."

Though the names look similar, the XTS and XT5 are very different vehicles. Where the former is a full-size sedan, the latter is a compact crossover, introduced just a couple of years ago as the replacement for the old SRX.

The XT5's interior offers 104.5 cubic feet of space inside for passengers, with 30 cubic feet of cargo capacity behind the second row (or 63 cubic feet with the back seats folded down). Fitting a coffin in there would require significant modification, but then so did the XTS.

The new XT6 might make for a better platform, with 12.6 cubic feet behind the third row, 43.1 behind the second, and as much as 78.7 behind the third. But neither crossover can match the capacity of the Escalade, which boasts over 120 cubic feet of cargo capacity in ESV spec with the second and third rows folded flat.